What happened to Malaysia Airlines flight 370?

On April 11, 2014, a crew member searches for signs of the crash in the southern Indian Ocean. Officials in Australia -- the country heading up the seearch -- have "narrowed" their efforts to a piece of ocean just a little smaller than the size of Scotland

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The red-eye to Beijing lifted off the Tarmac six minutes late, at 12.41am and made a climbing turn over Kuala Lumpur until it was heading northeast into the dark over the South China Sea. The aircraft, a twin-engine Boeing 777, was a marvel of engineering and avionics, one of the safest machines of any kind to transport people and, was flown by a pilot with more than 30 years of experience. The first officer, a young man who was engaged to be married, hadn't been born when the pilot started flying, but he was fully certified and still had thousands of hours of flight time.

There were ten other crew members on Malaysia Airlines flight 370, which flew for the last time on March 8, 2014, and 227 passengers. More than two thirds were Chinese nationals and another 38 were Malaysians. There was a Russian and two Canadians, two Ukrainians and two Iranians. There was an Italian in seat 34C and a New Zealander in 19C. A French woman, two of her children, her son's girlfriend and two Australian couples were four days into an Asiatic tour.

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There was an American in the first row of economy. His name was Philip Wood; he worked for IBM and had been transferred from Beijing to Kuala Lumpur. He was flying back to help his partner, Sarah Bajc, pack up their flat.

Twenty-four seconds after the plane left the ground, air-traffic controllers cleared it to climb to 5,500m on a line to Igari, a spot at the edge of Malaysian airspace. Over the next eight minutes, MH370 was cleared for 10,500m, its cruising altitude. Just before 1.08am, the plane's aircraft communications addressing and reporting system (Acars), which relays information on mechanical systems, bounced a message to a ground station. There was nothing abnormal.

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Controllers in Malaysia watched MH370's label step up their screens. The flight by then was out of primary radar range. At that distance, air traffic relies on secondary radar that gathers information from transponders in every aircraft. There are two of them on commercial airliners in case one fails.

At 1.19am, just before MH370 reached Igari, Malaysian controllers instructed the flight crew to switch their radio to the frequency for Ho Chi Minh control, which would take over.

MH370 passed Igari at 1.21am. Twelve seconds later, its radar label disappeared. Seventeen minutes passed before anyone was concerned.Air-traffic control in Malaysia and Vietnam radioed. Silence. Other pilots on other airliners tried, too. Static. The Malaysian Airlines operation centre called the cockpit. No answer.

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A few hours later in Beijing, Sarah Bajc checked the status of Flight 370 online. Delayed. Before long, she checked her computer again: news sites were reporting that a Malaysia Airlines plane had lost contact. By the time she got the official phone call, she knew MH370 was missing. The airline couldn't tell her anything more.

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Nine months later, no one else could explain what happened to that red-eye to Beijing. The plane still hadn't been found. Nothing from it -- a suitcase, an in-flight magazine, a life jacket -- had washed ashore. So maybe Wood was still alive. Sarah Bajc was still willing to believe. "The chances are slim," Bajc says. "But there's no proof that it crashed."

When nothing is certain, everything could still be possible.

On April 15, 2014, Australian crew move the US Navy's Bluefin-21 autonomous underwater vehicle into position to search the surface of the Indian Ocean floor in the hunt for clues

Reuters

Commercial airliners very rarely crash, but when they do there is always debris. It might be days or weeks before they get to it, but investigators eventually will find the fragments and, usually, a recording of the cockpit sounds and another of thousands of bits of flight data. From those, they will figure out why that particular plane fell out of the sky. They can determine if a spark from a loose wire ignited the fumes in a near-empty fuel tank (TWA Flight 800, in 1996), or if an air-speed sensor iced up (Air France Flight 447, in 2009), or if the pilot made a mistake (also Air France, as well as about half of all crashes, often in conjunction with foul weather, a mechanical failure or both). It might take a while to sort out all the details -- the recorders from Air France 447 weren't recovered for two years -- but there is always an answer.

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The search for that debris logically begins near where the aircraft was last known to be. So, at first light on March 8, ships and helicopters and slow, lumbering aircraft began scouring the waters beneath Igari. They found nothing from MH370. By the end of the second day, the searchers had still turned up nothing.

The Malaysian government at that point could well have known that MH370 was almost certainly nowhere near those waters. They had access to two pieces of information, the most crucial of which they kept to themselves, sharing with neither the public nor the search teams. The first, according to a well-placed source, was that the Malaysian authorities learned as early as the morning of March 9 that MH370 had probably continued flying long after its radar signal blinked off the controllers' screens. For almost seven hours, in fact, which means it was probably still in the air when search-and-rescue teams were swarming below Igari. They knew that at 2.25am, a little more than an hour after the flight's last contact, the plane's satellite-data unit powered up. From an antenna on top of the airframe, it sent a log-on request to an ageing piece of hardware wobbling in space above the equator, which then relayed the signal to a ground station in Perth, Australia, both of which are owned by British company Inmarsat. This was a cry from the void, MH370 effectively saying, "I'm still out here". Every hour after that, the Perth station bounced a signal off the satellite to the plane, asking if MH370 was still online. In the jargon, those are called handshakes, and the plane answered five of them – still here, hour after hour. Then, at 8.19am Malaysia time, the satellite data unit sent a second log-on request. It was not completed and the plane was never heard from again.

None of those handshakes, by themselves, indicated the direction in which MH370 had flown, how fast or how high or least of all where the flight ended. All of that would need to be deciphered, if it was even possible; the system was designed to provide a link for phone calls, not location tracking. But it could safely be assumed a plane that remained airborne for seven hours was many thousands of kilometres from where the search had begun.

Which leads to the second piece of information that was withheld: Malaysian military radar had tracked MH370 after it went dark. While civilians were frantically trying to contact a missing airliner, an unidentified dot blipped across military screens. After the plane went silent just past Igari, it turned hard to the left and flew west, across the Malay peninsula, then northwest through the Strait of Malacca, pinged by radar almost the entire way, yet ignored. "The military should be on high alert, everyone knows that," Julian Tan Kok Ping, a Malaysian legislator, says. "They should have scrambled fighter jets. If they allow an aircraft to fly in controlled airspace without a transponder and no one does anything, that's criminal. Imagine if MH370 had turned back toward KLCC." That's Kuala Lumpur city centre, where stand the Petronas Towers, currently the tallest twin spires in the world. "As MPs, we've raised this in the press many times, we've raised this in parliament many times," Tan says. "And there's no answer."

It's unclear when the Malaysians realised the military had tracked MH370. In May, in a summary of the search, the Ministry of Transport said the information was retrieved from "a playback of a recording from primary military radar", which would suggest that no one was paying attention when that recording was made. Some early reports, on the other hand, most notably by Reuters, had military officials watching an unidentified aircraft in real time and apparently not reacting. In any case, the military radar was made public on the second day and the search was expanded to the Strait of Malacca and the Andaman Sea.

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But the Inmarsat data strongly suggested MH370 wouldn't be anywhere close to there, either. On March 15, a week after the plane disappeared, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak announced that the search was being moved to the southern Indian Ocean based on what he called, many times, new satellite data -- the Inmarsat data. One could argue, as Razak did and not completely unreasonably, that revealing that information immediately would have been cruelly premature. The existence of the handshakes did not appreciably reduce the odds that MH370 had crashed. Announcing it had flown for hours without being able to say where would at best offer unwarranted hope and, at worst, horrific imaginings of a terrifying seven-hour death cruise.

On the other hand, one could also argue, much more convincingly, that revealing the Inmarsat data would have established a standard of transparency, and thus credibility, as the search continued. Yet the Malaysian government has never been a model of transparency, and to become one in the glare of global media would have been absurdly embarrassing. A plane crash is a tragedy. Losing a plane that made a rogue pass unmolested over sovereign airspace and then kept flying for seven hours is tragedy compounded by farce.

That information delay, then, became the original sin of omission, seeming to corrupt everything that followed. When governments obfuscate, they breed suspicion. And when they do so in a matter involving the lives of 239 civilians on one of the safest and most reliable jetliners ever to fly, they invite conspiracy theories.

Gallery: What happened to Malaysia Airlines flight 370?

If the loss of MH370 was implausible -- when an £80 phone can pinpoint its position, how could a £182 million aircraft get lost? -- then the reason for that loss, in the ether of unverifiable speculation, could be equally implausible. The blankness of the investigation became an enormous canvas upon which any fear, rationally considered or raving lunacy, could be sketched into a workable, and not disprovable, theory. Ten per cent of Americans, according to a CNN poll, believe the disappearance of an aircraft involved nothing more complicated than an alien abduction.

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The most common scenarios, of course, involve terrorists. One, which was dressed up into a hugely publicised Paris Match story by a French novelist, offers the possibility of MH370 being commandeered as a flying bomb and shot down by American fighters near a military base on the island of Diego Garcia. That was markedly different from the other shoot-down theory, that the flight was accidentally destroyed during a joint US-Thai live-fire exercise. Since no debris has ever been found, there is a more robust sub-set of hijack theories: that MH370 landed somewhere. Various versions had it touching down on Christmas Island, Afghanistan or Kazakhstan, to be either weaponised for future use or held for some other reason no one can yet fathom.

The possibility of a Kazakhstan landing was explained in detail by Jeff Wise, a journalist and aviation writer who has studied MH370 exhaustively since March 2014. In a speculative exercise posted on his eponymous blog, he suggested that the Russian and the two Ukrainians could have been Russian intelligence agents capable of disabling the crew and flying to a Soviet-era space base. The specifics are very technical, and there are problems matching parts of it to the available data. "The fuel model," Wise says, for instance, "doesn't allow it." The route would have traversed militarised and tightly monitored airspace, and the motive is completely unclear, except Vladimir Putin is an irrational thug. But it's a reasoned, good-faith exercise, and Wise argues Kazakhstan is more probable than any other terrestrial landing and no more improbable than a crash into the ocean. "You either think the debris must have washed up by now or you think it evaded all those northern radars," he says. "Which seems more impossible?"

That is a difficult question to answer. A year ago, everything seemed possible. Perhaps, for example, it was a failed hijacking. Maybe there was a struggle and a grenade went off and blew a hole in the fuselage and the plane depressurised and everyone died of hypoxia and the plane wandered off on autopilot for seven hours until it ran out of fuel.

A hijacking seemed plausible because of the way MH370 went dark, as if someone had pulled several circuit breakers in rapid sequence. Those circuits are beneath the cockpit that is accessed either from the cargo hold or through a hatch beneath the carpet next to the business-class lavatory. That hatch is not locked, and it is not difficult to locate; indeed, there are YouTube videos showing this.

Then, what of the pilot, Zaharie Shah? In the realm of theorising, Shah became either a madman or a hero. In the damning theory, he flew his plane into the ocean in mass-murder suicide because his marriage was falling apart or as an act of political dissidence, albeit an ineffective one, as he never bothered to tell anyone. And while other commercial pilots have deliberately crashed, most notably Germanwings copilot Andreas Lubitz in March, none have flown for hours beforehand.

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In the heroic version, MH370 was crippled by a catastrophic failure, one severe enough to sever communications but not to bring down the plane -- and the pilot did his best before being overcome by fumes or hypoxia. But that's not right either, since the first thing a pilot would do is drop to 3,000m, where the air is breathable, and there is no evidence MH370 ever flew that low.

Then there are the dark ops. In Malaysia, for example, two perfectly rational people told me the key was the 3.5 tonnes of mangosteen fruit in the hold. Perhaps those weren't mangosteens, they suggested, but rather, say, sensitive military technology that someone, probably the Americans, didn't want to reach Beijing. So they remotely flew MH370 like a drone to parts unknown and killed everyone.

Possible? Well, yes. Those Malaysians weren't the only ones to mention Boeing's autopilot, a counterterrorism gadget that, according to its 2006 patent, could be switched on "remotely via a communication link". But even if the plane had it, this seems like a lot of effort and death for a problem that could have been solved with a phone call -- stop that plane! -- or a few operatives sneaking past airport security that a pair of untrained Iranian refugees with bogus passports beat.

Yet are those theories really so easy to dismiss? Maybe, if there is nothing personal at stake. But if your wife or son or grandfather was on that red-eye to Beijing, the plane that no one can find and that left no debris and that was lied about, whether through incompetence or mendacity, in the hours after it vanished... then it is not so easy. Nor should it be. Hope is durable, especially when it is alchemised with mistrust.

On March 8, 2014, a relative of a passenger, at Beijing Capital International Airport, sought -- and failed to receive -- explanations about the fate of the flight; a prayer service in Beijing on April 8 marked one month since MH370 went missing

Reuters

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The French woman on MH370 was Laurence Wattrelos. She was travelling with two of her three children -- daughter Ambre and son Hadrien, 14 and 17 respectively -- and Hadrien's girlfriend, another French citizen. They were returning from a week on a Malaysian beach to Beijing, where they lived because Laurence's husband Ghyslain worked there for years as an executive at Lafarge, a cement and building-materials firm. Lafarge had transferred Ghyslain back to Paris a few months earlier but his family stayed on to finish the school year.

Ghyslain Wattrelos says that many people have contacted him since March 2014. He divided them into three categories. The largest group can be described as kooks. They tell him they know what happened because it was revealed in a dream or a psychic vision. Next are the fellow mourners who want to share their grief with him. The third category is journalists -- at least, those who introduce themselves as journalists. Some do not appear to be journalists at all. They ask questions, he explains, and he answers but they don't write anything. He suspects that they are spooks, trying to work out how close he is to finding out what happened. When we meet I tell him I am not a spook. Wattrelos gives me a half nod and a half smile. A real spook wouldn't tell him, anyway.

He was in the air when his wife and two of their children boarded MH370. He'd left Paris to join them in Beijing for a week and his flight landed at about 4pm. While the plane was still taxiing, he switched on his phone. There was a text from a friend at Lafarge. "I'm sorry, Ghyslain," it read, "for what has happened." French diplomats were at the gate. He has spoken to only a few actual journalists, and that is the part they usually want to talk about. Often they want to photograph him at home, preferably weeping over pictures of his family, which he understands but isn't comfortable with. "Of course, it is horrible," he says flatly. "It's all a black hole. It's awful."

Nothing more needs to be said of grief. Wattrelos does not want to discuss his emotions, with the exception of announcing his dominant one at the outset. "I'm not sad any more," he says. "I'm just... I don't know how to say it in English. In French, it's colère. Angry, but more than that..." Furious? "Yes. Furious."

He is furious because he does not believe that the Malaysian authorities -- and possibly, to varying degrees, the American, British, Australian, French, Indonesian, Thai and Singapore authorities -- have been truthful. Which is a reasonable assumption, considering the Malaysians were not truthful in the immediate aftermath. "They had something to hide from the beginning," he says. "It pisses me off when journalists say it's the biggest mystery in aviation history. No, it's not. It's a cover-up. Maybe the reasons are good, but we need to know." A good reason, he says, would be if MH370 had been hijacked, which is what he initially thought. "If it's a hijacking, you have no choice: you fly it somewhere and you shoot it down," he says. "That, I could understand. If Malaysia or the US, if they shot it down to avoid another 9/11, I think everyone would understand that."

But when weeks passed without any wreckage being found, Wattrelos began to suspect the plane might have landed, though where or for what purpose he could not say. He is well versed in all the theories, but he does not favour one over the others. "Everything is possible," he says. "But they're lying to us."

Wattrelos's disdain for the French government is personal and it began with an official silence. "When something happens to French people, they always say something," he says. "For this flight, they never said a word. To me, that is very strange." He wrote a letter to the French president, François Hollande, outlining his concerns, and got banal generalities from an aide. "My interpretation is they can't say they don't know anything," Wattrelos said. "He didn't want to lie." In March, he asked a French judge to begin an inquest into MH370 as an act of terrorism; in late August, his application was denied for jurisdictional reasons he does not find convincing. "That's why I believe they [the French and, by extension, other governments] know what happened."

Wattrelos has one surviving child: a son who is 21. "I wake up every morning for two things: my son and this fight," he said. "But everything else is awful. And when the fight is over, it might be worse, this is true. But for now, I have this fight." Part of that fight required hiring a private investigator. Wattrelos, Sarah Bajc and the families of two Indian passengers raised money on Indiegogo to pay him, but by December the money was running out and the PI wasn't having much success. Maybe it would have been easier if more people -- the relatives of the Chinese and the Malaysians on board – had been involved.

It's December 2014, and Wattrelos has flown back to Kuala Lumpur to see Bajc and the PI. When he lived in Beijing, Wattrelos used to visit Malaysia fairly often, but this was his first time back since his family disappeared. "The airport, we say, 'It's a cheese with holes'," he says. How else did two Iranians on stolen passports slip through? He talks about his daughter. Before she boarded MH370, she was texting a friend. "I'm happy to be going back to Beijing. I'm going to see my father." Wattrelos looks at the traffic. "So that's what I'm thinking," he says, "when I see this airport."

Sara Bajc and Philip Wood had been together since the autumn of 2011. She'd been in Beijing for eight years, first with Microsoft and then with a Chinese technology company, but she'd cashed out and started a master's degree in education so she could teach business and economics to children. She was out with friends and they wanted to go dancing. She didn't. She stayed at the bar and ordered a drink. "I've never seen a woman drink bourbon," a man two stools down said. "Especially Wild Turkey." They were living together soon after. They were both divorced and it was good for her children to see her with Wood. He was respectful, kind and affectionate. The movers arrived on the morning of March 8, more than two hours after Wood should have arrived. She got the official phone call when the removal people were in her flat, packing her life in China.

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CBS News interviewed her the next day. She said the things people usually say, that she did not accept that the man she loved was truly gone. "I'm not willing to give up hope that there's a chance we'll find survivors, that we'll find the plane," she says. That was not, she tells me, reflexive denial. She did not believe then, and certainly did not believe last December, that MH370 simply fell out of the sky. "I was sure it was intentional," she says. Partly that was instinct, but also logic. Airliners, with their multiple communication systems, do not go completely silent unless they've been destroyed or hijacked. Yet there was no wreckage in the shallow and heavily travelled waters beneath Igari, which suggested those transponders and radios had been deliberately turned off. "It all pointed to an abduction," she says. "And it had to be talked about. Otherwise, it would be spun."

Bajc believes the Malaysian government knows what happened. If the authorities weren't truthful at first, there's no reason to assume they're being so now. "The country is covering it up," she said. "That should be considered criminal conduct; the cover-up. What they're covering up, we don't know." We are at a café in Kuala Lumpur, near the apartment she and Wood had picked out and not far from the school where she teaches. She lives alone, except for a cat. "This is the place we'd decided to build a new life. This is where I last spent time with him," she says. "I had to be close. And I still expected to hear something. Never did I expect to go this long without knowing."

Australian ship Ocean Shield hunting for remains of MH370 on April 9, 2014. Among the equipment onboard was a submersible, should any debris be detected

Corbis

Aviation-security expert Captain Desmond Ross sits in a pub in the Pyrmont neighbourhood of Sydney, Australia.Born in Belfast in Northern Ireland, he was taught to fly by the RAF and most of his career was in aviation security, including years in Southeast Asia. There are protocols when civilian airliners blink off radar screens. Ho Chi Minh control should have been in contact with Kuala Lumpur within three minutes of MH370 not showing up, preferably two, and most definitely not 17. Civilian controllers should have contacted their military counterparts, and there should be written and audio records. If they exist, they've never been released.

When unidentified, unresponsive aircraft appear on military screens, fighter jets should be scrambled. Those pilots are supposed to visually identify the plane and drift in close if there's no response. "They can look in the cockpit. If the pilot's not there, or dead, they can see that." That those things did not happen leaves, for Ross, two choices. "Incompetence, total dereliction of duty, which amounts to criminal negligence," he says, "or a conspiracy." He lets that hang for a moment, then: "You have to discard most of the conspiracy theories." He ticks off the main ones. There's no evidence the pilot or co-pilot was suicidal. A hijack? "There's no point in hijacking it and not taking credit," he says, "unless they fucked up and want to try again." At that point, nine months after the fact, no one had. And stealing it? "If someone believes that they can hide an aircraft and 239 people," he says, "they're kidding themselves."

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That leaves incompetence or gross dereliction of duty, which Ross favours. It would explain why questions aren't answered, records aren't released and there are holes in the narrative. "Malaysia's dug themselves a trench because they're trying to save face," he says. "Do not underestimate that. If that's the case, they've dug such a fucking trench they could bury all of Kuala Lumpur."

In Canberra, Australia, Martin Dolan hinted at much the same thing. He is the chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) which is in charge of the search. But he's limited in what he can say. What about, for instance, Indonesian radar? It should have picked up MH370. "It detected nothing..." Dolan starts. "Wait, I'm sorry. There was no detection. I have to choose my words carefully. I can't say more about Indonesia, but they are not concealing anything." As for Australian radar, he chooses his words even more carefully. "It, ah... wasn't aimed there at that time. And that's all I can say."

Dolan understands that those are the kind of words that breed conspiracies. He also understands bureaucracies. "Speaking as a career public servant," he says, "if you have a choice between a conspiracy and a stuff-up, go with the stuff-up. It's a good rule of thumb."

Malaysia Air flight 370 is probably at the bottom of the southern Indian Ocean.That is the consensus view, at least, of a great number of technically savvy people, of whom there are far too many to form a coherent conspiracy.

That conclusion is based on the seven handshakes between Inmarsat and the aircraft. The signal for each of those brief data exchanges had to travel from a ground station in Australia to a satellite in space, down to the moving airliner and then back again (or vice versa for the log-on requests initiated by the aircraft). The signal travels at a fixed speed, so by measuring how long it took to make the round-trip cycle, engineers were able to calculate how far the plane was from the satellite during each handshake.

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Those calculations produced seven circles, each centred on the satellite, upon which MH370's possible route could be plotted. For practical reasons -- the plane had neither the fuel nor the time to get west of the satellite, for instance -- those circles were snipped to arcs, one stretching north from Thailand to Kazakhstan, the other slashing through thousands of kilometres of empty sea in the south. Assuming the plane went down during or straight after that final, abbreviated handshake, it would be at a point on or very near one of those long curves.

The next step, then, was to figure out which direction MH370 turned out of the Strait of Malacca, the last point Malaysian military tracked it. Because the aircraft was moving, the frequency of the signal it sent either stretched or compressed on its way to the satellite. It's the same principle, to use a common example, as a train's whistle seeming to change pitch as it passes. The difference between the frequency the ground station expected to receive and the one it actually did -- whether that hypothetical train's howl sounded higher or lower than it does at a standstill – would indicate whether the plane was travelling towards the satellite or away from it and, thus, north or south. The algorithms to sort all that out had to be developed on the fly. But Inmarsat engineers by mid-March calculated MH370 had rounded the northern tip of Sumatra and flown south, apparently until it ran out of fuel. Exactly where depended on a number of variables – altitude, speed, winds, the precision of the last turn, whether that even was the last turn. (The plane "could also have flown around in circles and ended up almost anywhere on the final arc," they noted in an autumn 2014 paper published in The Journal of Navigation.) But they'd at least placed it along a narrow, if dauntingly long, slice of the Indian Ocean.

Inmarsat engineers are not the only ones to have reached that conclusion. Analysts working for five different governments, including the US, Britain and Australia, have too, although they differ on precisely which point on the seventh arc is the most likely. Perhaps more important, a number of sceptical civilians with deep expertise in satellites, avionics, communications technology and the like have scoured the data as well. Among the paranoids and crackpots cluttering the internet, a few dozen scientists, technicians and others, including Jeff Wise of the Kazakhstan postulate, last spring sorted themselves into something called the Independent Group (IG). They were forced to rely on limited data, cobbled together from public documents and databases. (The IG has never seen Inmarsat's complete data logs.) For the Malaysian military radar track, they used a news photographer's picture of a slide shown at a briefing for the passengers' next of kin. A Lenovo engineer named Bill Holland culled a few columns of unreleased data from the b-roll of a CNN piece on Inmarsat. "This is really reverse engineering in a very, very ugly way," he said.

Between them, the Independent Group members ran the data through countless flight scenarios of differing speed and altitude, and in September issued a report arguing that MH370 probably spiralled into the Indian Ocean 2,400km southwest of Perth. At the time, the ATSB had its search zone nearly 1,000km north on the arc. On October 8, after refining its own analysis, the ATSB moved south to almost exactly the same spot.

This January, four ships were steaming across 59,000 sq km of ocean, bouncing sonar waves off the bottom, which in some places is more than 4,200m down. Eventually, maybe, a signal will hit a large metallic object -- say, a Rolls-Royce Trent 892 turbo-fan engine -- and the recovery of MH370 will begin. "We are very confident," Martin Dolan tells me, "that if the aircraft is where we've calculated it to be, we'll find it." The search is expected to be completed by May. And if they don't find it? "Then we'll go to the governments," Dolan says, "and say, 'We've got a problem. A very expensive problem.'"

Early one morning last year, a commercial airliner disappeared over Southeast Asia. It was a big, modern aircraft, well maintained and flown by a seasoned crew on a routine flight. Air-traffic controllers watched it climb out from the airport for almost an hour, a small block of identifying letters and numbers stutter-stepping towards the top of their screens. There was heavy weather in the area: a string of monsoon-season thunderheads. The pilot asked air-traffic control if he could deviate from his assigned path, which was allowed, and to climb to 11,500m, which was not because of other traffic. Five minutes later, the signal for Air Asia Flight QZ8501 was gone. It blinked off the screens, its communication systems went silent, and it was presumed -- because this is always the presumption soon after such things occur -- that it had fallen out of the sky.

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The search, by ships and helicopters and planes, began in the most logical place, which was where QZ8501 was last known to be. They looked until nightfall and the next day, too, but did not find anything. There is always debris, except for that one time when there wasn't, and suddenly it seemed that it was all beginning again. On that second day, before the wreckage was found, a man called Calvin Shim sent me a text. He lives in the sprawl of Kuala Lumpur and we'd been trying to connect for weeks. "QZ8501 is really a recurrent shock for me," Shim texts. A moment later: "I am available for phone call now."

We speak about his wife, Christine Tan, who had been a flight attendant with Malaysia Airlines for more than 20 years. She worked long-haul flights to Paris and London but every so often she flew the red-eye to Beijing. She'd called a cab the night before she left for her final flight. Shim walked her out with their six-year-old daughter. "Mummy," she said as Tan got into the car, "can I give you one last kiss before you go to work?" Shim winces. "I remember that," he says, "because I didn't feel comfortable." He didn't know why. Now he tells his kids they should ask for one more kiss, never one last kiss. His wife had been gone almost ten months the night he told me that.

He wanted to be a realist, to believe that he hadn't been lied to. But what if one of the other theories, the ones dismissed as conspiracies, is true? What if it landed? How can he know? So he pays the bill every month for his wife's mobile phone. And when his mother tells her grandchildren, "Mummy is in heaven", he gently corrects her: "Don't say their mother's in heaven," he says, "because we don't know yet."

Sean Flynn is a correspondent at GQ's US edition

This article was first published in the June 2015 issue of WIRED magazine